It’s A Very Terry Christmas at the Roxie!

6:45pm – BRAZIL (1985, 35mm)

Terry Gilliam’s 1985 cult classic BRAZIL is a wonderfully dark examination of bureaucracy in a brutally oppressive future. But its backdrop — the lead-up to Christmas — makes it one of the best Christmas movies of all time.

Originally titled ‘1984½’, in a double nod to George Orwell and Federico Fellini, ‘Brazil’ takes place ‘somewhere in the mid-Atlantic’, in a dystopian retro-future inspired equally by 1920s expressionism, ’40s noir and science fiction. Jonathan Pryce is Sam Lowry, a downtrodden, daydreaming drone trapped in an endlessly complex bureaucratic system, who finds his life falling apart when he takes up the case of Archibald Buttle, an ordinary man accidentally arrested in place of Harry Tuttle, a rebel heating engineer played with dashing old-school élan by Robert De Niro.

The plot is devilishly complex – taking in torture, terrorist bombings, radical plastic surgery, illegal plumbing, carol-singing secret policemen and loads of ducts – and the cast is nothing less than a who’s who of iconic British character actors, including Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Jim Broadbent, Ian Holm, Ian Richardson and Gorden Kaye, alongside token Yanks De Niro, Kim Greist and the legendary Katherine Helmond as Sam’s ageing beauty-queen mother. From the epic fantasy landscapes of Sam’s dreams to the claustrophobic cocoon of his apartment, from the soul-crushing industrial wasteland of the outer city to the pristine fascist dominance of ‘The Ministry’, ‘Brazil’ remains one of the most breathtakingly beautiful, painstakingly designed movies ever shot in the isles. (Time Out)

142m/35mm/Director’s cut

9:30pm TWELVE MONKEYS (1995, 35mm)

“They’re the ones who are going to do it. I can’t do anything more now. I have to go. Have a Merry Christmas.”

A flamboyant post-apocalyptic fantasia “inspired by” Marker’s famed 1962 short La Jetée, Twelve Monkeys casts Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, and Madeleine Stowe in the trippy dystopian tale of a convict from 2035 who is sent back in time to learn more about a mysterious virus, perhaps unleashed by the terrorist Army of the Twelve Monkeys, that killed most of humanity in 1996. Only trouble is, upon arriving in 1990s Philadelphia, the convict (Willis) is immediately incarcerated as a madman and imprisoned alongside a particularly loony Brad Pitt.

The script is by Janet and David Peoples; the latter also penned Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Unforgiven and co-wrote Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Peppered with allusions to Vertigo (the eerie Muir Woods scene is reenacted wholesale), this post-apocalyptic head-trip is Gilliam at his most cracked and brilliant.

129min/35mm

FREE OR DISCOUNTED FOR MEMBERS

BRAZIL (35mm) & TWELVE MONKEYS (35mm): Upcoming Showtimes

December 22

6:45 PM

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Wednesday, December 20

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The Roxie Theater is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization supported in part by Grants for the Arts, the Northern California Community Loan Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Thendara Foundation, the Voluntary Arts Contribution Fund, and our members and donors.